Best CSS Optimization Tips for Faster Websites

05 Mar Best CSS Optimization Tips for Faster Websites

Do you like to stand in queue for a long time, Obviously No!

Then why your readers wait to load your website.

Website speed plays a significant role in your user engagement, bounce and also in SEO. Search engines don’t like a slow website more. You have to optimize your site to load fast for better ranking in SERPs.

In website layout design, CSS responsible for styling your web page. Also, CSS has enormous impacts on your site load speed as well. If your website CSS optimization a good then your website will faster than bullet train!

In this article, you will know the best ways to optimize CSS for faster websites. Read the full article carefully and implement it on your website, and see how CSS optimization can surprise you.

15 Best CSS Optimisation Tips for Faster Websites

Audit your Website

The very first step is to take an audit of your website and check performance. There are many diagnostic tools are available to check CSS performance. To optimize CSS, you should know where you have to make changes. You can use online tools, as well. There are few online tools to check your website. A few online tools to monitor the performance of your website.

1. GTmetrix

2. Google PageSpeed Insights

3. Pingdom Website Speed Test

4. WebPageTest

These are the few tools to audit your website performance. First, take an audit and note down performance issues with your site.

No more Icons

Nowadays, a lot of font base CSS icons are available. So, build your website without graphical images and prefer font base CSS icons. These icons help to reduce website load time as well.

CSS styling text is better than a graphic text image

If you’re putting some visual text images that can hit you so hard. Images increase the size of the page that leads to the slow speed of your site. You can use simple text and style it with the help of CSS.

Prefer Gradients and SVGs

Images are enemies of your website, don’t trust them. Images increase a lot of page size of our website, Which slows down the site.

SVG stands for Scalable Vector Graphics. These images are a load faster than any JPG or PNG image. Also, you can convert your traditional images into SVG.

The gradient is also a better option to use over a background or stylish image. If you’re using a large background image for a website, then you should consider gradient.

Don’t @import rules, use <link> tag

To relate or link any style sheet with a website do not use @import. It is not good to go with @import. We should use a <link> tag over the @import Rule. We have to insert the <link> tag with the file path.

Example of Link tag: <link rel=”stylesheet” href=”demo.css”>

Use modern methods for box

It’s time to say bye to traditional box methods, and say welcome to flexbox and CSS Grid. In traditional methods, we have to use many tweaks like padding, margin, etc. Flexbox and CSS are new modern methods and more easy to implement.

Reduce redundant code

Do not make your CSS code more complicated. Make sure your CSS file does not have any redundant CSS code. If it has, then remove it and make your system more meaningful and fast to load.

Remove Whitespace

During the writing process of CSS, Please do not put extra whitespace between code. Whitespace can take a lot of bytes to store in a file. It can put a difference in an ethical and best website speed.

Make Shorter Name of Class and ID

While creating ID and class names in HTML code, try to short name of them. We can save a lot of byte size in CSS file with short class and ID’s technique.

E.g. A class name India can be “ind”.

Note: Make sure your short name of the class, makes sense and easily rememberable.

Document your code

Always putting a comment in the CSS code is a good practice. CSS comments are helpful to find out the structure of CSS code and to find unnecessary code. Then you can easily find and delete a redundant CSS code.

Remove Unnecessary Fonts

With the help of Google fonts, we can easily add any fonts on our website. But this is not good at all, because to style a few words it can increase size in hundreds of kilobytes.

1. Only use different fonts when it becomes necessary to do.

2. Try to use default fonts that are already available in systems.

Remove your unnecessary fonts from CSS files.

Don’t tweak more

Sometimes we use a lot of CSS in the same file. Do not tweak your CSS code for different browsers in a single CSS file. If you want to load different CSS files in the firebox, then write a separate CSS file for firefox and link it with the main CSS file.

Put the CSS file on top

Always put your CSS file in between <head> and body tags. Also, put the javascript file at the end of the data. If we prefer CSS file code over all the files, then it takes less time to display content on display.

Never put JS file over the CSS file, it can slow down your website.

Avoid! important Rule

Sometimes, !important rules are work like magic but do you know it can hurt your site speed as well. Do not use it! important tag every time, consider it as a last option. As we know, an Important tag can override any other declaration you used in CSS file at any stage.

If our code has too many !important rules than a browser will take more time to load styles.

Minify and Compress CSS Files

After implementing above all steps, its time to compress your CSS files. For a website, we used many CSS files for different purposes. After minifying and compressing these files are load faster. There are many tools like “Cleancss” that are compressing CSS files.

Understand your CSS code

It is the final CSS optimization tips from our side is “understand your CSS code.” Many times we copy code from other resources for a quick solution, but it’s necessary to understand the purpose of your CSS coding and how it’s working.

Conclusion

CSS optimization is a game-changing factor for faster websites. There are a lot of CSS optimization tips that you can apply on your website to load it faster. These tips are so easy to implement but can enhance website speed a lot more. CSS is easy to learn but hard to master, so implement all methods carefully, All the best.